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Daylight

It had been sixty-two years since Sean Becker had last seen the light of day. He had been thirty-five years old when he was murdered in the early morning hours of July 23rd in his native Los Angeles. Cause of death was a mysterious loss of blood.

For six decades, Sean walked the night and shunned the day; a creature whose name was only whispered in dark secrecy: “vampire”.

He first encountered Dr. Elizabeth Woods as she was leaving work at London’s Biomedical Research Centre. He stopped attacking her when she cried out that she could help him. Woods was developing treatments for rare blood disorders. Fourteen months later, she’d cured his.

Woods wanted to run more tests, but Sean was more interested in taking in the daytime sights. Tears streamed down his face as he boarded the tour boat.

I wrote this as part of a flash fiction writing challenge. The challenge is to write a flash fiction story with a word count of 100-150 based on the weekly photo prompt you can see at the top of the page. Find the challenge at Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers.

To read the other stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Once again, I “blame” Iain Kelly, since reading his work, including his response to this challenge, has inspired me to write more flash fiction. I brought this one in (not including this after-statement) at 148 words.

24 thoughts on “Daylight”

Thanks, Harry. I appreciate you stopping by and commenting. Flash fiction almost always has more to say than the word count allows.

Actually, I “borrowed” Sean from a short story series I’ve developed on this blog about a reluctant vampire. I first featured him last October in the short story Even Coffee Doesn’t Help. There are links to the subsequent story at the bottom of the page that let you click through the tales in sequence if you’re interested.

Thanks, Priceless. I’ve been following Iain Kelly’s blog and noticed he was using these prompts, so I decided to give it a go.

Sean Becker is actually a character I “borrowed” from a short story series I’m writing on this blog about a reluctant vampire. It’s less about horror and murder and more about how an ordinary person would manage and live out his “life” if he woke up in his grave one evening as a creature of the night.

He was first featured in late October in the short story Even Coffee Doesn’t Help, and starting with that story, I placed links to each subsequent tale at the end so people could click through the series.

Don’t know if you’re interested in that sort of thing, but if you are, I’d love if you’d give them a read and comment (and if you’re not, no worries).

As I’ve mentioned to others, my character “Sean Becker” is “borrowed” from other, longer stories I’ve written. He was an ordinary man, married with three children, when he was turned into a vampire.

His basic personality hasn’t changed, and although he has to do some rather unsavory things in order to survive, he’s trying to cope with being the same person and being a vampire. He’s not evil, just driven.

I changed when my character first became “bitten” and then speculated what it would be like for him to be cured.

I admit, the photo was a challenge because tour boats are so “ordinary” and I tend to write about the extraordinary. Stanly Elkin is quoted as saying, “I would never write about someone who was not at the end of his rope.” In this case, I’m writing about someone who’s just been given a reprieve from the hanging after sixty-two years.

It’s actually a complicated dynamic being human again after six decades of being “undead”. Everyone he ever knew in his former life is either dead or very old. He can never go back to who he was, but he can try to move forward in to the sunlight.

Actually, he’s got a lot of challenges. He has no official identity. If someone ran his fingerprints, assuming they’re on record, they’d find out he was born in 1919. Of course, I haven’t covered what he had been doing for the past sixty some years besides drinking blood at night. He’s obviously travelled the world many times. He may have found a way of generating an income, legitimate or not.

In my “Sean Becker” chronicles, I’ve created an underground movement of vampires and humans who connect vampires to night jobs, places where they can safely sleep during the day, phony ID records, and alternative methods of acquiring blood (although this last part is difficult). I’m up to a point in those stories where Sean is working (under the table) with a private detective in modern Los Angeles. A lot of night work and vampires are good at blending in with the night.

Someone I know just opened a “condolences to the estate of…” letter (his own “estate” — from a financial institution). I wonder if I should look into what he does when I’m asleep or be suspicious in any way ; )

Thanks. It’s not entirely my idea. in the early 1970s, there was a daytime soap opera called “Dark Shadows” that included a vampire character named “Barnabas Collins”. In the film based on the show, Collins is nearly cured of being a vampire until his doctor, who was in love with him, discovered he was seeing someone else.